DARK AGES AMERICA

This is the Blog for MORRIS BERMAN, the author of "Dark Ages America". It includes current publications and random thoughts about U.S. Foreign Policy, including letters and reactions to publications from others.
A cultural historian and social critic, MORRIS BERMAN is the author of "Wandering God" and "The Twilight of American Culture". Since 2003 he has been a visiting professor in sociology at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
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January 14, 2013

The Wages of Guilt

From Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt, pp. 259-60:
Karl Jaspers, in The Question of German Guilt, argued that people should be collectively held responsible for the way they are governed. So if their country, for example, is ruled by a criminal regime, the people are responsible for that state of affairs. Also writing after the war, the Japanese filmmaker Itami Mansaku ridiculed the notion that those who were “deceived” about what was happening were necessarily innocent. The deceived, he wrote, have to share the blame with the deceivers; “the entire people was to blame for its lack of criticism, its slavishness, its incapacity to think” (quote from Buruma). Thus he came to the same conclusion that Jaspers did, that “people must be held responsible for the society they live in.” This is an important idea, says Buruma; without it, “the institutions necessary to maintain open, liberal societies cannot survive.”
Just think of all those people, for example, who condone the current American regime on the grounds that “the Republicans would be worse,” or who voted for Obama knowing full well that every week his predator drones were murdering women and children in Pakistan and Afghanistan. When people start to get routinely locked up for dissenting opinions; when whole swaths of the population sink into starvation; when eco-catastrophe is finally upon us, full force: Who will be responsible? The American government, or the “innocent” citizens who kept it in power? Will ignorance, or even stupidity, be enough of an excuse?

About Me

Morris Berman is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and North America, and has held visiting endowed chairs at Incarnate Word College (San Antonio), the University of New Mexico, and Weber State University. During 1982-88 he was the Lansdowne Professor in the History of Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Berman won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, the Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992, and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity (from the Media Ecology Association) in 2013. He is the author of a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness–-The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000)–and in 2000 his Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review. Dr. Berman relocated to Mexico in 2006, and during 2008-9 was a Visiting Professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City.